Saturday, September 30, 2006

I've been listening to Rammsteins' songs lately. Actually only three of his songs..This is an drawing inspired by him :p doesn't quite look like him.. hey.. tis' just a cartoon.. so i guess it's ok. Rammstein's songs i like are Ichiwill, Feuer frei, Du Hast.

Friday, September 29, 2006

Gone are those days of one of the most addictive games. The extruciating pain in waiting for just half-an hour for the classes to end and the people to come back to play the game. It was like an every day ritual for me, Used to wake up at 8.30 rushto CVIT and write some pages of thesis eagerly waiting for the time to read 2.00pm. That was ilke the unspoken time of day break for any of the gamers at IIIT-H. My last few days at IIIT were more exiting than ever before, it was a long time since i had been a newbie at any of the games played at IIIT, the new batches were coming up with better and newer games for playing and it was really hard for me to catch up with them. You know i was busy with all my research work which was eating up my gaming time :( Warcraft was never a popular game in IIIT-H, but all that changed once DOTA was discovered. I for once got so hooked to the game that i did not mind being a newbie again, it was fun learning the game and playing it too. Thanks to some of the players who made it quite and audible game. CS which was kinda dominating the IIIT game server space began to shrink, i am told its' gaining its' share again but i would say DOTA has definitely eaten some of its' share. I really want to play DOTA again soon, soon enough that i dont' forget the game. Hopefully ill' be able to play during the diwali.

Monday, September 04, 2006

I was asked to create a video tutorial of how to use the tool i developed in linux. Well there aremany softwares in windows which allow you to create a video of what ever is done by the user. For instance Fraps is a popular software which can be used to capture the game play as videos. But i did not know of any such software for linux. I started hunting for it and i was exited to find that i did not need a software for doing it.. I could do it myself... i found a wonderful tutorial about making a video of the screen capture. It took me only a few minutes to get my video done :) I think this would be a very useful tutorial for all those linux lovers who envied people presenting their windows tools in the form of videos.

After i created a video using this method, i realized that it was too slow, actually my prof did not like the video. So i started searching for alternatives. That is when i came across tools like vnc2swf, DemoRecorder, etc. These tools work just fine if you want to record whats' being done in normal widgets... in the sence the windows which do not use OpenGL. So the next best thing was another command which can grab the screenshot in less time. 'xwnd' is the answer. This is a command which comes along with the X server tools. It can save the desktop view in a file in an internal format ".xwd" so instead of "import" i started used this new command. I reduced my screen resolution to 640x480 and recorded the desktop view. The final output was a better, smooth video of the demo.